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Authors: Marlys Millhiser

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BOOK: The Rampant Reaper
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T
HEY ORDERED ANOTHER beer when their sandwiches arrived and discovered the salad was the lettuce, onion, and tomato garnish on the buns with the pike and the pork. And probably the ketchup that came with the fries.
“You've got to try a bite of this—used to be served at hamburger joints and drive-ins everywhere. Haven't seen them since I left Iowa.” Edwina cut a hunk off one end of her sandwich and Charlie did the same with hers to exchange.
“Kenny Cowper's body does not look like he maintains it on deep-fried stuff like this.” Although Charlie had to admit it was the best deep-fat-fried “stuff” she'd ever eaten—crispy, crunchy, salty, and hot through. The fish tasted like freshwater, the pork like pig, and the fries like a thicker version of McDonald's.
“Know what another delicious irony is? Ladies don't drink beer in pool halls in Myrtle. And I'm going to suggest shipping Great-aunt Abigail off to the outside world, where tonight will prove that foreign ladies do drink beer in pool halls. That ought to get some of the guilt turned in the other direction, cause some consternation in the other camp. We should have dinner here tomorrow night, too.”
“We have to catch the eight a.m. vomit comet to Minneapolis the next day. Can't we spend tomorrow night in Mason City?” And get a decent shower? How do people who don't have showers wash their hair?
Marshal Delwood swept in on a cold wind, waved at a few
of the “boys” who called out to him, and shoved in beside Charlie. “So where the hell is Marlys?”
“I don't know, Marshal Sweety. Lost her in the cemetery, like I told you.”
“Well, I figured you'd gone back looking for her. Since you lost her.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Don't you feel any responsibility?”
Actually, she did, but Myrtle was not the place to let anybody know that. Poor old woman was wearing nothing but a thin dress, sweater, and tennis shoes the last time Charlie saw her. “You're the marshal, that's your job.”
“Here you are in the pool hall swilling beer and that poor old lady's out there? It's supposed to freeze hard tonight. Know that?”
Charlie took another bite of pike burger which she absolutely didn't want—it was twice as big as she could eat and her capacity valve was about to revolt. “I'm not one of you. She's your responsibility. I don't live here, remember? So what are you doing sitting in the pool hall when you could be out freezing your butt doing your job? What's the matter with you?”
That elicited a two thumbs-up from Edwina, an accolade Charlie couldn't remember ever receiving from her mother.
“You are not normal, lady.” He had the nerve to grab a french fry off her plate and dip it in her ketchup.
“Oh, come on, Brunsvold.” Kenny Cowper walked up with a glass of beer of his own and one for the marshal of Myrtle. It was like he just appeared suddenly up out of the floor, which, with someone his size and magnetic charge, was an impossibility. He slid in beside Edwina. “Last time you lost Marlys, she'd slipped into Orlyn Sievertsen's doghouse between his Labrador and Saint Bernard. All three were warm as toast next morning, and Orlyn's dogs have been howling nights ever since 'cause they want Marlys back. Admit it. Marlys Dittberner is crazy. But she's not dumb, and certainly not
helpless. Meanwhile, women, I would just like to point out that your real sin here in Myrtle is to come into my pool hall and piss off my clientele by ignoring the whispered jokes, smirks, leers, winks, and nod-nods around you. Have you no shame? Sitting here totally absorbed in your own conversation? It is incredibly rude, self-involved, self-important, unfeeling, and—”
“Above ourselves.” Charlie winked at her mom.
The marshal shook his head in disgust and poured more ketchup for Charlie's fries. “Don't look at me like that. You're the one wouldn't let me have pecan pie for brunch.”
Charlie was so stuffed she couldn't get through a third of the second beer and Delwood Brunsvold went through her fries in minutes. She'd just handed him the rest of her sandwich when Ben, the same guy who stopped them this morning, rushed in with almost the identical question as then. “Marshal, you looking for Marlys? I just saw her next door and she's buck-naked. Gettin' cold out there.”
If Charlie didn't know better, she'd have thought this whole scene was scripted.
It had been a long time since Charlie Greene had seen her breath frost the air and felt a stinging nip at the end of her nose. But the rest of her was warm, if bloated. The law in Myrtle had declared that everyone stay in Viagra's except Ben, himself, and Kenny Cowper so as not to frighten Marlys.
The jeers this time were not for Charlie and her mother.
“Whose army's going to frighten Marlys Dittberner?”
“You need help, boy, you call.”
But everyone except Charlie followed Marshal Del's orders.
“This woman's trouble.”
“I noticed.” Kenny reached around a partition, grabbed his jacket, and put it over Charlie's shoulders. “Southern California girls got water for blood. Hot water, but still—”
His down jacket came to below her knees and she was glad of it. She and Ben stood waiting for the marshal and the owner of that jacket to act out in the doorway.
“Against the law to have open liquor containers on the sidewalk, and glass ones at that, in this here town of Myrtle,” said Delwood and raised his glass to Kenny's face. Okay, reached.
“Well, nobody ever told me that and I own the damn pool hall.”
“No lie. It's on the books.”
“Myrtle's got books?”
But they both emptied their glass glasses, nodded in agreement, handed the glass containers to Charlie, and walked off. “Come along, Ben.”
Charlie handed the beer glasses over to Ben, who stood looking at them. The guy who owned the damn pool hall and the guy who upheld the law were sort of giggling at each other until she slid in between their chumminess. “Maybe we should go find Orlyn's dogs?”
It was dark, but you could see the sky through parts of the roof of the two-story derelict next door. The guys had decided on a new tack. They each had hold of one of her arms, which made for a lopsided tableau.
“So what do you think, Charlie? Does Marlys need an agent?”
“Actually, I think Marlys needs a manager.”
“What about Abigail Staudt?”
“She's going to love Boulder, where everyone is more opinionated than she is, if not more righteous. They're great arguers there. They'll love her, too. They can turn guilt on its head. You know, all that sun in Colorado makes people weird.”
“She can't leave Myrtle.”
“Then she's still Myrtle's problem, isn't she?”
“They make women meaner every year,” said the marshal.
“Don't Marlys … oh, Jesus.” The barkeep let go of Charlie's
arm barely in time to catch the naked form that fell from the ruin of the second story.
“If there's an ordinance that disallows glass containers on the sidewalks, why isn't there one that makes landlords shore up ruins or tear them down instead?” Charlie took off Kenny's jacket and threw it over Marlys Dittberner. She smelled better naked.
“‘Ordinance?' ‘Disallows?'” the marshal said. “Man, you valley girls talk like lawyers.”
“Marlys owns this building. Was once her grocery store—times got bad, they used to deliver even. By horse and wagon. So much history in these little backwaters, all being lost to senility, Alzheimer's, agribusiness, and the Grim Reaper.”
“For a Myrtle boy, you talk funny,” Charlie said right behind Kenny.
They carefully traversed the rotted flooring, moonlight through the rooftop and second floor lighting their way.
“You must not have met Mr. Rochester yet,” the barkeep said, his voice coming from his feet.
“Oh, shit, I forgot this is the full moon. Hang onto her tight, Kenny.” Del followed behind Charlie, who was watching the creepy play of shadow and blackout on the floor. Almost gave her vertigo.
A dog howled across the street. The floorboards creaked beneath their feet like the barn out at the home place. Marlys groaned. Charlie missed Kenny Cowper's jacket. It was freaking-cold out here, especially when the wind whistled through the holes in the building.
At the back of the store, they stepped out another hole onto a cement loading dock with cement stairs down to the alley, went past the exhaust fan of Viagra's kitchen spewing french-fry odors, up a wooden staircase to a balcony, and into Kenny's home. It was mostly one enormous room with shoulder-high bookcases—well, shoulder-high on Kenny—dividing it into sections for sleeping, office, workout equipment, an entertainment center and lounge along one wall, kitchen
and eating space between and along windows overlooking Myrtle and Main Street. The enclosing wall space was decorated with old grainy photos of the pool hall, the railroad station, and more guys lounging around ancient autos or playing baseball. The bathroom and a closet were closed off at the rear.
“Very nice,” Charlie, who should have been fussing over poor Marlys, said.
“My whole family used to live up here with my grandparents.” Kenny laid Marlys on a couch and wrapped her in a blanket. “I sort of like it better this way.”
Marshal Brunsvold was on his cellular to Gentle Oaks. “Yeah, we got Marlys—tried to do herself in again. I don't think she's hurt much. I'll be bringing her up.”
“Why wouldn't you let her kill herself if she wants to? Can't be much fun being alive at the Oaks.”
“Against the law,” the marshal said without hesitation. “I'll drive the car around to the alley side so we don't have to depress the revelers in your fine establishment, Ken. If you'll just carry her down for me.”
“That law must be on those books he was talking about. First time I've heard of them.” That smile, slow and easy and knowing, reminded Charlie of a cat stretching. Oh, boy.
Marlys decided to get feisty about the time Marshal Sweetie's Cherokee came to a stop in the alley, so Charlie drove it while he hung on to the ancient woman with Charlie's eyes.
“This is insane,” Charlie said as she pulled into the semicircle in front of Gentle Oaks, where the leaves were falling big-time now in an icy wind and the moon loomed large and bright and orangey. Marlys growled low in her throat and the law growled back.
“Del.”
“Sorry, I get carried away when the moon's full, too. Specially the harvest moon because it means football and snowmobiling and pheasant hunting and Halloween. Right, Marlys?” He chuckled low and evil, and Marlys copied that
sound with a little too much gravel but even more evil. “Besides, watching you and Kenny look at each other could steam up all North Iowa.”
“How long has he been back from the outside world?”
“About eight, nine months now. He likes Myrtle a lot better than your mom.”
They both literally wrestled a frail, little old Marlys Dittberner into the nursing home's outer doors, losing the blanket on the way—Charlie was briefly reminded of the famous photograph of a fleeing girl, mouth gaping in a scream, napalmed in Vietnam—when the inner doors opened at them in an horrendous roar of rage. Not the doors—the two guys in wheelchairs.
I
F CHARLIE WAS getting a little spooked by the moonlight leaking through a ruined grocery store that once delivered by horse-drawn wagon, it was nothing compared to Gentle Oaks at the full of a harvest moon.
“What do you people do around here for Halloween?” she asked the marshal as they wrestled a naked-again Marlys through careening wheelchair lunatics, but that awful alarm system drowned out her voice.
Fatty Staudt and Fatty Truex were trying to arm-wrestle each other out of their wheelchairs. Their hospital gowns opened in the back and swung free among flailing arms. Even bare-gummed, they could voice vile expletives over the alarm, but their snarls were slurred and hissy. Wouldn't you think the testosterone would have worn out by now, even if they hadn't?
Charlie was looking for the doohickey to turn off the alarm when a bare, hairy arm came down in front of her face and did it for her. The doohickey was a cream-colored box beside the door, and the hand at the end of the arm curled its fingers under it to turn it off. The hairy arm belonged to Richard Burton in his younger days when he was alive—the moody, broody, smoldering Richard Burton. Just one problem, his eyes were almost black, like Charlie's.
“Just
what
do you think you're doing?” he thundered in a stage voice with accents suggesting the British, but trained for Broadway. “And who the hell are you, anyway?”
“Jane Erye?” Please tell me you're not Harvey Rochester
or I'll pee my pants right here and now. “You talk funny.”
“You notice that, too?” Marlys Dittberner stopped struggling to look up into Charlie's face. “Ain't normal, huh?”
Marlys had had a double mastectomy with no attempt at a rebuild. That's why she didn't wear a bra. Made sense. This woman made sense in a lot of ways Charlie really didn't want to deal with.
“Help me, help me, please help me,” a woman's voice pleaded from somewhere close and then screamed. At least the TVs were off.
“What are you doing here, Harvey?” Del wanted to know.
Marlys groaned and peed on the floor. Charlie groaned and crossed her legs.
An enormous fat Siamese with long hair waddled down the hall, sniffed the wet spot on the carpet and then hissed at Harvey.
“Dolores, get thee hence,” Mr. Rochester intoned and pointed behind him, where Charlie spied the saving grace of the universal sign for ladies' room.
She left Marlys with the marshal—“Don't lose her this time, dammit”—and made it in time but barely because of an all-consuming hysterical bout of laughter. Whoever said the nice old Midwest was boring and predictable hadn't visited Myrtle, Iowa.
Charlie was still giggling when she and the marshal and the Jeep Cherokee circled the drive and roared out to the main road. Del explained Harvey's presence there was due to the weekend staff and the full moon. “Residents get really violent sometimes and they're always understaffed on weekends—temporary help. Can't sedate or restrain the residents anymore. Most you can do is antidepressants or anxiety drugs, and then only on doctors' orders. Temporaries get hit around a few times, they just walk off the job. Sometimes even Harvey Rochester has to step in and help out. And he's the boss.”
“Why does he act like an actor?”
“He is an actor. Or he was. Spent years in New York. Never saw him on TV or anything, but we all figured he must be acting.”
“Actors, artists of any kind, tend not to be good businessmen. They use different sides of the brain or something.”
“I don't know, old Harvey's a pretty good businessman. Must mean he's a bad actor, huh?” Delwood laughed at his own double entendre—when it hit him.
“What kind of a cat is Dolores?”
“Tomcat.”
It was raining by the time they reached Viagra's. The Lumina was gone.
“Edwina must have left without me.”
“What kind of daughter goes off and leaves her mother in a pool hall, anyway?”
“An adult daughter. And I was driving this heap so you could restrain Marlys Dittberner, remember? So you can take me out to the home place, Marshal Sweetie.”
“Marshal.” Ben whoever ran up to the Jeep, “Kenny wants you should take a case of Bud out to Elmo when you take Miss Greene home. Her mother left with their car. I'll run get him.”
“What is he, the town crier?”
“Watchman.”
“Myrtle has a watchman?”
“It's on the books.”
“What's he do—never mind.”
“Gets paid for it, too.”
“Now stop that.”
Kenny came out of Viagra's carrying a big box like it was a feather, slid it onto the backseat, and looked at Charlie closely.
Clutch.
“That the warmest coat you brought? Wait a minute,” he said and went back into the pool hall.
“I was going to take Uncle Elmo a six-pack but—”
“Kenny keeps him in beer. If he runs out, he'll drive his pickup into town. Family keeps him in food and cigars. We take care of our own.”
“Why shouldn't he drive into town?”
“No license, him or the pickup. Macular degeneration in his eyes. Legally blind.”
“This is the most depressing place I've ever been in. How come I do so much laughing here?”
“I think maybe your answer came before your question,” Kenny said, crawling in beside the Budweiser and handing his knee-length jacket over the seatback to Charlie. “What do you think?”
“Who invited you, Cowper? You have a business to run, you know.”
Charlie noticed the Cherokee was the only vehicle, parked or otherwise, on Main Street, or what she could see of it. There were no streetlights in Myrtle.
“Weather report emptied the pool hall half-hour ago. Front moving in. Myrtle rolls up the sidewalks by nine anyway. But it was a fast exodus tonight.”
“Snow?” Charlie asked.
“Ice,” both men answered at once. Kenny added, “And I felt it my duty to protect the only law-enforcement individual for many miles—his virtue, you know.”
“Well, I'm glad I've got a ticket out of here at eight o'clock Tuesday morning.”
Both men chuckled.
“Death duties rarely lasted a year back then, two was almost unheard of,” Uncle Elmo explained over weak tea and brownies at the kitchen table that night. “There wasn't nursing homes. Poor farms maybe—but you didn't want to send anybody you knew there. They was mostly nursing homes and loony bins. Women took on the chore for love and as a duty
and out of guilt and often in hopes of money to support themselves and their children. Weren't many jobs for them outside the home. Might be unspoken, but there was always a daughter discouraged from romance and marriage. That was the one meant to see to the parents so the others could go on with their lives. When women started working and earning their own way, the system broke down. Ain't no fixing it now. Can't blame desperate people for trying, though.”
“I couldn't come back here to live. I hated it here. I still do.” Edwina was all sad again.
“You was always such a pliable young thing. Husband gone and you getting toward retirement age, we figured maybe coming home would sound good. Didn't realize you'd changed so much. Abigail's lived here all her life—couldn't send her off to Boulder.”
“Why? Nobody here can stand her anyway,” Charlie said. “She gets righteous with people out there, they'll just shun her. Sounds like justice for all.”
Elmo Staudt had a big nose with a heavily veined bulb at the end and a rather endearing rascally gleam in those blue eyes that didn't see well enough to get a driver's license. “More like vengeance. Vengeance ain't right. What do you plan to do when you retire, Edwina?”
“I've been kind of thinking about Prescott, Arizona, for part of the year.”
“I didn't know that, but it seems perfect,” Charlie said—anywhere but Long Beach. “I have a writer there who flies out of the little local airport to the Phoenix airport and then anywhere. He really likes it.”
“What could you do there you can't do here?”
“Almost everything I like and want to do.”
“You could walk the desert to your heart's content.” Charlie was beginning to see why they were marooned out here at the home place with Uncle Elmo and not in Helen and Buz's nicer house in town. These two had a relationship from Edwina's childhood nobody else in the family did.
“And I'd like to do some traveling, and there's a book I want to write—I probably won't have time to get to until then—on the function of intestinal diseases among the
Dipodomys ordii.”
“You won't be writing no highfalutin books around Abigail Staudt, I tell you. Schoolteaching either. And what would you do with her anyway when you went to this Prescott place?”
“Mom's not a schoolteacher. She's a university professor, for godsake.”
“I wasn't going to have her living with me, Uncle Elmo. I'd put her in the Towers. It has independent-living apartments for the elderly and it's not far from campus.”
“She wouldn't know anybody. What if she got sick? And that would cost money.”
“There's a nursing home attached. And she'd have to get to know people, and yes, it would cost money. With both sisters gone, she can't be destitute. If she is, we'll all just have to pitch in and help, won't we? Since we're all family.”
The Greenes trudged upstairs to their icy bedroom, leaving Uncle Elmo Staudt staring after them, flabbergasted.
“Do pack rats really have intestinal diseases?” Charlie asked her mother, pulling up all three comforters and putting Kenny Cowper's big coat on top of the pile.
“Everybody does.”
“After tonight, I'm not spending another night in this house, Edwina, and that's that.” All she slept in was a man's T-shirt, and she could see her breath on the air up here. “And I'm not letting them put the screws to you. You don't owe these people anything for making you feel like a toad when you were growing up.”
“It's not that simple, Charlie.”
“Your parents are dead, right? You had no brothers or sisters. Let the cousins take care of their own.”
“My parents are buried not far from Great-aunt Gertie. I'll show you tomorrow. But you saw Fatty Staudt at Gentle
Oaks today. Well, he's my grandfather. He was Edward Staudt the First, my father was Edward Staudt the Second, and I was supposed to be Edward Staudt the Third. Thus Edwina. The long-awaited brother never arrived—a great disappointment to the family.”
“Edwina, that is so dumb. It's not like there was a throne to inherit.”
“And the final blow was that I married Howard Greene, a lapsed Jew, and eventually adopted you.”
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